IAN CHENG
I’m nine years old watching Jurassic Park (1993) at the
cinema for the third time. The velociraptor is hunting the kids in the
kitchen when the edge of the scene suddenly bursts into white lava. I
don’t remember this happening before. I lean forward in my seat, excited
to discover a new detail. The effect blooms everywhere. Humans and
dinosaurs erode into abstract bleeding blobs. Someone screams up at the
dysmorphic raptor, then back at the projectionist. I look back at the
booth – the fucking film is on fire. Projectionist and flames jumping
around up there. House lights come on. Ushers guide us to emergency
exits. Outside in the parking lot, everyone stands searching,
squinting. No one knows what to do or how to behave. There were no plans
to be anywhere else right now.
Narrative is itself an intuitive technology for normalizing change,
for cohering the experience of reality into a sequence of measured
consequential developments – a kind of user experience (UX) design for
organizing the look and feel of reality.
But sometimes random, unscripted, unforgiving, unmotivated, inexplicable
shit hap­pens. Contingency is change happening faster than a human
being can immediately narrate, when the UX can’t keep up in real time.
The degree to which human beings can deploy narrative as a format for
cohering the cameos of reality’s contingencies is related to the
frequency with which we have to deal with those contingencies. An
isolated cinema fire in 1993 can be UXed in its retelling.
But now it’s 2013, and there’s the feeling that the straight story
can no longer normalize the complex, unpredictable forces of reality
that intrude with greater and greater frequency, let alone the incessant
stream of big data reporting on these complexities. What is the
intuitive story of climate change? Shifts in the market? Mutations in
your brain? Your browsing history?
Specialists turn to non-intuitive technologies like quantitative
analysis, simula­tion modelling and probability in order to trace
narratives that account for the present and make predictive
narrations of the near future. But for the rest of us, this kind of
non-human storytelling is counterintuitive to our intuitive UX. We
receive it, but we don’t feel it, so we can’t embody it. Anxiety takes
hold when embodied narration fails.
The evolution of the narrative form necessitates mutating our
intuitive ux for story­telling with a coefficient of persistent anxiety.
Anxiety is a condition that cannot be eradicated, but can be managed.
Is it possible to shift from a culture that wallows in anxiety towards
the creation of narrative tools that contain and manage a bug of anxiety
within them?
Imagine a narrative format that has probabilistic outcomes.
Imagine a narrative format that can simulate unscripted contingencies against scripted choreography.
Imagine a narrative format that requires its authors to embrace contingency and irreversibly change during its making.
Imagine a narrative format that doesn’t promise a scheduled time to end.
Imagine a narrative format that erodes as you erode.
Some formats are already technically here. Recent treatments for
post-traumatic stress disorder deploy virtual reality simulation –
brimming with contingency and algorithmic anxiety – as a complement to
classic therapeutic narration.
But that’s just the tip. To be ready for the future is not to imagine
outlandish cure-all technologies, but to do the work of developing
formats to integrate intuitive and non-intuitive technologies towards
unnatural normalization.Ian Cheng is an artist, director and aspiring centenarian, based in New York, USA.
–TIMOTHEUS VERMEULEN
Yael Bartana, ‘And Europe Will Be Stunned’, 2007–11, installation view at Petzel, New York, 2013
Ian offers an intriguing and inspiring account of the correlation
between narrative innovation and technological development, which I find
myself mostly agreeing with. There are a few thoughts I would like to
develop further: I agree that narrative is our intuitive technology for
making sense of change. Each new narrative development, whether it is a
(inter)medial progression or one within a medium, allows us to make
sense of new kinds of changes – changes that may have previously seemed
contingent. (What we mean when we say something is contingent is, after
all, not that it is simply random or meaningless but that its meaning is
dependent on a variable.) The 19th-century novel, for instance, by
devoting as much attention to the working classes as to the higher
echelons of society, enabled people to contemplate changes pertaining to
democratization. Modernist art, flattening and fragmenting, did much
the same for Structuralist notions of identity.
To be sure, this relationship between narrative and change is not
causal. New narrative forms or techniques emerge from new social and
technological configurations, which in turn arise from new narrative
forms. It’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing.
What people call art, or have come to call art since Romanticism, is
often a practice that develops such a new form. Jacques Rancière praised
Gustave Flaubert’s ability to turn literature from a hierarchical
medium into a more egalitarian discipline, where not only king and
pauper are equal, but also plot and detail, foreground and background.
Similarly, Gilles Deleuze admired the way Francis Bacon developed
painting from representation into potentialization. Often such
developments show what the medium is capable of and signal its
limitations. Surely Flaubert’s strategies would be better suited to
photography, just as Bacon’s operations appear to presuppose the medium
of film. So here the function of ‘art’ is simultaneously to deconstruct
the existing rules of narration and to devise alternative,
as-yet-unimaginable models.
In this respect, I think Ian is right to suggest that new narrative
technologies can integrate the intuitive and ‘non-intuitive’, and can
create hopeful narratives that contain ‘a bug of anxiety within them’. I
believe this is already happening. Ian’s own work, Entropy Wrangler (2012), is a case in point, as are Ragnar Kjartansson’s Sorrow Conquers Happiness (2006), Guido van der Werve’s Nummer acht, Everything is going to be alright (2007), Yael Bartana’s work on the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (2007–11) and Mariechen Danz’s Cube Cell Stage
(2012). Kjartansson, for instance, sets out to change the meaning of
the titular sentence even though its meaning is semantically fixed.
Bartana calls for the foundation of a Jewish state in one of the most
anti-Semitic countries on earth. The Postmodern specialists Ian mentions
asked ‘What if?’ But this question is not a question of development. It
is a question of stagnation. When you ask ‘what if?’ you close down
possibilities: you calculate all the paths you could logically take from
your current position. What Kjartansson and Bartana wonder about is ‘as
if’. Let’s act, they say, as if it is possible to do something we know
it is not. Pretending opens up possibilities: it imagines alternative
routes without regard for logic or reason. Ian, Kjartansson, Bartana –
they all contemplate the possibilities that new technologies may offer
for narratives, simply by pushing a particular kind of narration beyond
its own limits.
If it is true that Web 2.0 and the blogosphere have returned the
people to the public sphere – producing debate, participating in the
narration of our times – then it is the people that can best answer how
digital media will influence storytelling. Silly as it may seem, my
answer is: DIY, probe your own narrative forms, and find out.Timotheus Vermeulen is Assistant Professor of Cultural Theory at
the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and founding editor of
the academic arts and culture webzine Notes on Metamodernism.
–FATIMA AL QADIRI
Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid al Gharaballi, Mahma Kan Athaman (Whatever The Price) , 2010, a novella published by Bidoun magazine
What if the ‘what if’ that Timotheus proposes were transmogrified to
posit the question, ‘What if Arabic writing were to accommodate
technological mutations in the future?’ Will this orthographic mutation
affect Arabic narrative structures?
What if, via the blogosphere, as Timotheus speculates, Arabic were
returned to the people to participate in the narrative of their times –
that is, revolutionary times? For those unaware, Arabic is a triglossic
language – meaning it exists simultaneously as the Classical Arabic of
religion, as the journalistic and literary Modern Standard Arabic, and
as the various regional spoken Arabic languages – the orthography of
which has scarcely altered in centuries. But a large-scale mutation
appeared in the 1990s with the advent of text messaging, when people
started using the Latin alphabet in conjunction with a set of numbers,
to represent consonants that exist in Arabic.
There have been a few names coined to refer to this Arabic ‘chat’
alphabet, such as Arabish, Arabizi and Araby. However, Arabish and
Arabizi, for instance, only refer to their combination with the English
language – but what of Arab Francophone and Arabic variants of other
Western languages? I would propose we re-frame this orthography as
‘Arabix’, in order to avoid the limited linguistic spectrum associated
with said terms and to highlight the textual aspect of the alphabet. For
instance, my name is spelled ‘Fa6ma’, in Arabix. The ‘6’ represents a
consonant that does not exist in English, hence the need to
transliterate it via a numerical symbol. I adopted the Catholic ‘Fatima’
as a Latinate spelling to accommodate the disorientation of non-Arabic
speakers.
Arabix was born as a technological necessity at a time when mobile
phones and computer keyboards did not accommodate the Arabic alphabet –
something they later did via Smartphone technology, keyboard design and
alphabet switching software. This mutation effectively allowed any
dialect of Arabic to be written and pronounced – provided the user was
able to comprehend the Latin alphabet – which previously had not been
possible on such a widespread and functional scale. In the past,
Moroccan, Lebanese and other Arab artists and nationalists had attempted
to write publications in their dialect, as a way of escaping Classical
Arabic, the only accepted orthography, as works of linguistic
revolution. Now that Arabs can write in any dialect using Arabix, will
this give birth to an industry of new Arabix narratives? Will publishers
of books and magazines accept this transgression and recognize the
validity of Arabix?
I have been admittedly shy of reading Arabic narratives due to my
British and American education from an early age. Arabic seemed
needlessly stuffy and outdated, a reminder of Latin in the Middle Ages
belittling a hearty buffet of European vernacular. I embraced English
novels, magazines and newspapers with blind vigour as I deemed English
to be alive in the present moment – particularly in articulating my teen
angst in ways that Arabic never could. With age and higher education, I
realized that this harsh dismissal reflected a youthful ignorance of
the complexity of Arabic, and its rare linguistic situation as
triglossia.
Just as the blogosphere is being used to topple governments in the
region, will Arabix ever be recognized as a language capable of rich
narratives, in conjunction with Arabic – living side by side as two
sides of the same expressive coin? Borne of chat and text, will Arabix
spiral to novel-length aspirations? Will we read Arabix texts in the
near future that incorporate unnatural normalization, as Ian envisions?
Arabix is exciting because it’s a fairly recent orthography that will
feasibly grow with the number of bilingual Arab speakers – speakers who
abandoned the language in their youth to learn a Western lingua franca,
but now yearn for Arabic narratives in adulthood (myself a prime example
of a person in said linguistic limbo). I know I’m not alone in
embracing Arabix.
There is tangible change across perennial systems of the Arab world.
Perhaps Arabix will be a long-term and recognized orthography that will
alter narrative structures in present and future times. Having made this
speculation, the probability of a published or digital Arabix
narrative(s) available now is very high. But an Arabix library, whether
digital or irl, is hopefully not far away.Fatima Al Qadiri is a New York-based Kuwaiti composer and visual artist. She is a contributing editor at DIS Magazine and a contributor to Bidoun. She
has produced music as a solo act under her own name and as Ayshay, and
has performed and exhibited at museums worldwide. Al Qadiri’s work will
be shown as part of the group exhibition ‘Trade Routes’ until 27 July at
Hauser & Wirth, London, UK.
–ALEXANDER PROVAN
Do we want a new form of narrative made in the crucible of Web 2.0?
Or do we simply want narratives that capably represent the experience of
life in the early 21st century?
If the former – if we want to ‘disrupt’ narrative – I have some
suggestions. A company called Narrative Science promises to inaugurate
‘the new age of storytelling’ by employing algorithms to process big
data into stories. The pitch: ‘With spreadsheets, you have to calculate.
With visualizations, you have to interpret. But with stories, all you have to do is read.’
Meanwhile, the start-up Summly aims to condense all news into
‘algorithmically generated summaries’. As the company’s 17-year-old
founder avers, thanks to Natural Language Processing, the world’s
information will conform to ‘my generation and their style of content
consumption; fast and to the point’. And then there are the ‘human
curators’ – the best kind! – at Project Webster, who assemble Wikipedia
entries and non-proprietary textual pap into print-on-demand books with
Google-optimized titles like Classical Children’s Stories and Their Influence on the World’s Culture: Orbis Pictus.
If we want to do the latter, well, how about the novel? None of the
new narrative formats that Ian proposes seem alien to the novel – if one
considers the life of the novel over time, in relation to readers now
and in 300 years, whether in New York or on colonized Mars. I resist the
notion that a form as durable and capacious as the novel must be
supplanted by some new narrative technology that seems bred by our
particular – and patently exploitative – social, historical and
technological configuration. (Statements about Web 2.0 and the
blogosphere having ‘returned the people to the public sphere’ reek of
Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.) Flash back to 1992, when novelist Robert
Coover published a paean to hypertext entitled ‘The End of Books’. ‘With
its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as opposed
to print’s fixed unidirectional page-turning), hypertext presents a
radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favouring a
plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader
from domination by the author,’ Coover gushed. ‘Hypertext reader and
writer are said to become co-learners or co-writers, as it were, fellow
travellers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetic
and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be
called the author.’
Epic fail. Hypertext may have enabled intriguing literary experiments
and satisfying on-screen realizations of Poststructuralist theory, but
have you ever tried reading GRAMMATRON, Mark Amerika’s
putatively groundbreaking 1997 hypertext narrative? In 50 years, how
many people will think of such works as anything but technological
novelties?
Even in the age of industrialization, the novel must have seemed like
an anachronism to some. But Victorian literature managed to register
and respond to the new regime of production and the accompanying
psychological conditioning. Authors like Anthony Trollope and Charles
Dickens – for whom the onset of factory time felt ‘as if the sun itself
had given in’ – filled their novels with time-sensitive mechanical
processes attended to by members of a nascent managerial class
constantly checking their pocket watches; efficiency meant productivity,
leisure was tantamount to revolt. Literature functioned to process –
and often combat – the fragmentation wrought by industrialization, even
while capturing some of its dynamism.
I don’t mean to argue for the supremacy of the novel, or to discount
bleeding-edge aesthetics, but rather to assert that traditional
narrative forms can represent contemporary experience just fine
(depending on the author). We don’t need algorithmic literature
or refresh-ready tweet-books. In fact, it seems important to maintain
some distance from the world of apps, some tension between our
hyper-mediated daily experiences and the forms we use to represent them,
if we are to maintain some lucidity in the face of the onslaught. Which
is to say: I don’t need my text-messaging proclivity relayed back to me
in the form of a never-ending sms epic written by a robot in China
generating chapters in response to my online shopping habits and
geolocation data. What we do need – and this is why I find
Fatima’s contribution so compelling – is a way to process the spectral
standards that buffet us; new languages, or at least styles of speaking,
to describe the invisible infrastructures and technological protocols
that order human interaction, so as to avoid submitting to
their dictates.
Perhaps this means incorporating the networked chat-language
described by Fatima and the corporate uncreative writing outputted by
Narrative Science, Summly and Project Webster into a novel – an Arabix Bartleby set in a Natural Language Processing lab.Alexander Provan lives in New York, USA, and is the editor of Triple Canopy.
–CHRISTIANE PAUL
The ‘Cave’ at Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown University
Bartleby is safely settled in the Natural Language Processing Lab and prefers not to do the writing demanded of him.
The future of writing has always been written collaboratively, a
linked document. In 1934, Paul Otlet envisioned a global network of
‘electric telescopes’ that would allow people to browse through, share
and ‘write’ millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video
files. People would send each other messages and form social networks.
In 1945, army scientist Vannevar Bush described a device called the
Memex, a desk with translucent screens that would allow its users to
browse books, periodicals and images, to create their own trail through a
body of documentation and insert their own story. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge contributed, writing his ode to Kubla Khan’s palace Xanadu in
1797. During the 1960s, Theodor Nelson developed his vision for the
hypertext system Xanadu, a space of writing and reading where texts,
images and sounds could be electronically interconnected in a non-linear
environment that allowed readers and writers to choose their own paths.
In the 1980s and ’90s, hypertext software was developed as a
narrative format that, as Ian proposes, ‘requires its authors to embrace
contingency and (irreversibly) change during its making’. A narrative
format that ‘doesn’t promise a scheduled time to end’. In 1992, I
encountered a narrative format that ‘eroded along with my reading’: a
floppy disk storing William Gibson’s 300-line semi-autobiographical poem
Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992) encrypted itself after a
single reading. The letters and words in Dennis Ashbaugh’s artist book,
in which the poem was embedded, started fading upon exposure to light.
In the 1980s, Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce wrote Storyspace, a
software programme for creating, editing and reading hypertext fiction.
Joyce wrote Afternoon, a story (1987), the ‘granddaddy’ of all
hyperfiction. The future of writing moved to the web and, as projected
interactive installation, into the physical world. Online, Mark
Amerika’s GRAMMATRON (1997) told the story of a digital creature encoded in a magic sorcerer-code called Nanoscript. I read GRAMMATRON and Afternoon, a story
and will always remember them as more than technical novelties. In
1999, The Electronic Literature Organization was founded to promote the
future of writing in the digital environment. A few years later, the
‘liberatory hype’ surrounding hypertext was declared to be a narrative
in itself, but experiments with hypertext fiction still thrive and have
their fanbase.
One day in the early 2000s, Robert Coover led me into the ‘Cave’ at
Brown University, where a story started writing itself onto the walls.
Once the walls were covered, the words started peeling off them, falling
towards me in 3d. I tried to catch them, throw them back at the wall,
put them in their destined place of the story, but they kept
disintegrating, memories of a story beyond reconstruction. The story
seemed to know that it was unstable – it openly talked about it. Around
the same time, I found an online portal to Yael Kanarek’s World of Awe
(2000–ongoing), a parallel world that took me on a search for lost
treasure. In a desert terrain, I found a graveyard of hardware and
software, the lost files of a traveller and love letters. I had to
construct realities, the love letters started arriving in my inbox, the
story entered my hardware and my life.
In the 2000s, I encountered a narrative format that simulated
(almost) unscripted contingencies against scripted choreography. In
2005, I started visiting Trip and Grace behind the Façade of
their home and marriage that Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern had written
for them. This artificial-intelligence based animated story made use of
language-processing software. It cast the player in the role of a close
friend of Grace and Trip who visits their home for cocktails and,
talking to them, has to deal with their marriage troubles. The
intelligence of Trip and Grace may have been artificial, their world
virtual, but the narrative was real. It was different every time I
entered their home.
I don’t enjoy playing games per se; I prefer not to stick to
rules for winning and losing. I love wandering through game worlds and
exploring their territories and hidden narratives, without shooting and
stealing cars. I love meeting Non-Player or Non-Playable Characters
(npcs), non-human artificial intelligences written by humans for humans,
and creating stories with them. A YouTube video entitled ‘Top 5 – Worst
NPC in games’ declares Navi, Beggars, Mr Rosetti, Sticky and ‘any NPC
that has to be escorted’ as the worst. I like escorting NPCs through
stories.
The future of narrative is already here, we just have to continue nailing its moving targets.Christiane Paul is Associate Professor of Media Studies at The
New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, USA.
– JAMES BRIDLE
Alex, I think, is half-right when he says that the novel is an extant
technology capable of representing the experience of life in the early
21st century. Text is mutable, capable of encompassing worlds and of
endlessly reviving itself – as in Fatima’s Arabix texts, and as has
already been done in Verlan, in Hinglish and in a multitude of argots.
These are new languages produced by the intersections not only of people
and cultures, but by new modes of experience and the technologies that
mediate them.
New Sapir-Whorfian realities emerge not only between languages across
technologies, but out of those technologies as well. Technological
fluency shapes an understanding of the physical world, sometimes for the
better – when the global push towards transparency and freedom of
information emerges from a Computer Science mode of thinking; and
sometimes for the worse – as in the all-too-common engineer’s denial of
the human morality and politics inherent in their tools. These
differences are also reflected in the particular vocabularies of
engineers and programmers, who form new cultural groupings around their
specialities (a comparative anthropology of Ruby and php programmers
would be an enlightening exercise). Softwares are made of language too;
they are narratives, written by hand, and they shape the quotidian world
more forcefully, perhaps, than any novel.
The argot that for me best represents the affect of this mediation is
not to be found in the melding of human languages, but in the sometimes
broken, sometimes poetic vernacular of machines. The algorithmically
generated mutterings of spam comments on blogs and Twitter feeds.
Narrative Science and Summly’s daemons are the house slaves of the new
House of Wisdom, but a more creative collaboration is to be found in the
charming rhythms of Google Poetics (‘I had this hate that I lost in
September / i had a heart and it was true’) and The NY Times Haiku blog
(‘Before, you could hear / the platforms creak and the faint / slap of
hoops on skin’) – lines of human language rescued from oblivion by the
attentive archivism of machines. Or the radiant, endless non-sequiturs
of the Twitter feed @Horse_ebooks (‘we shall and we will and we will and
we shall and we do and we care and we live and we love and we care and
we shall and we care and we’) – the truest disciple of Tristan Tzara’s
exhortation to ‘organize prose into a form that is absolutely and
irrefutably obvious’.
As softwares shape the world they shape language, too. We share the
network not just with the high-octane stealth algorithms embedded in
stock exchanges – the coked-up city boys of botworld – but with the
bookish automated editors of Wikipedia: 20 of the top 30 contributors to
the online encyclopaedia are pieces of software, quietly shaping our
systems of knowledge alongside us. As we come to understand the role
these other authors play in narrative and reality, our sense of the
reliability of text, of authorship, thins and shakes.
As Ian rightly says, reality is a narrative, but admitting non-humans
as co-creators of that narrative is not counter-intuitive, it is the
most necessary step in resolving our contemporary anxieties. The text
has always been interactive, and unstable; reality has always been
complex, overloaded and prone to collapse. The network, laying all of
this out to us across a grand atemporal plane, merely throws these
contradictions into sharp relief. What has changed is not the form of
the writing, but the form of our reading of it, and our understandings
of what constitute authorship, culture and collaboration. The network is
a narrative, too: the truest telling of contemporary experience, if we
can learn to read it.James Bridle is a writer, artist and technologist based in London, UK. His work can be found at booktwo.org.
–ORIT GAT
David Gatten, The Extravagant Shadows, 1998–2012, digital film still
In 2011, Bill Keller, the former executive editor of The New York Times,
published a piece in the newspaper’s magazine titled ‘Let’s Ban Books,
Or at Least Stop Writing Them’. It was a cheeky polemic about the fact
that his employees kept taking leave in order to write books, which
would stack shelves packed with too many books about too many topics.
There’s more information available to us today in more forms than ever
before. Does that mean that we need to reconsider what we call
narrative?
A lot of the responses so far bring up the novel as the narrative
structure par excellence, and I find that oddly comforting. But I wonder
if our consideration of what narrative is should focus more on the
technological structures we developed in order to share information and –
yes, Ian, Timotheus – make sense of the present. A lot of what we do
online is observing and commenting on the present in real time,
constantly patching it, adding to it, documenting it, taking away, then
chipping slowly at the foundation that we have just built. I like Ian’s
idea that our browsing histories are a narrative in their own right. But
I also like Alex’s assertion that traditional narrative formats remain
useful in contemporary society.
The way we consume and produce narratives today is a layered
structure that allows for different systems of storytelling – or sharing
information – to exist horizontally. On the one hand, there’s nothing
like the writing techniques of 19th-century novels – which a number of
the previous contributors have referred to – as an organizing scheme. On
the other, I think of my immaterial library, and the way my email
account is full of messages from myself to myself, where the subject
line is a link to an article or essay that I haven’t finished reading
and where Gmail asked me ‘Send this message without text in the body?’
With reading lists, bookmarks and rss feeds, we all have our ways of
organizing the information we search, find or stumble upon online (and
the possibility of sharing it): those systems are also narratives. They
can reveal anything from the practice of research and the process of
thinking to the view outside one’s window. Both are ways to look at the
present and, with it, speculate on the future.
The gap between the ways that we produce and consume narratives in
what we may consider traditional formats like novels and what we still
refer to as new mediums seems too productive to be ignored. If we feel
the need to untangle something within the changes we experience, peeling
at layers of narrative and its presentation could be a constructive
process, a kind of solution to the over-availability of information
today. In keeping with the idea that ‘journalism is the first rough
draft of history’ and if a lot of the content we produce online could be
considered a kind of reporting, then we need to spend more time with
things, just the way a novel allows. Maybe the narrative of the future
will set forth some possibilities for some good old-fashioned,
take-your-time reflection. Orit Gat is the senior editor of Modern Painters and a contributor to Rhizome.
–HOLLY WILLIS
Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, film still
As Christiane says, the future of narrative is here, and has always
already been here. Cinematic narrative exists in an ever-changing state
of flux that is not productively periodized, least of all by
technological ruptures. Rather than fetishize pre- and post-lapsarian
paradigms for thinking about narrative, we might look forward by looking
back.
Take Raymond Bellour. He explored the future of cinema and narrative in a 1990 collection of provocative essays titled L’Entre images (an English translation of which, Between-the-Images,
was published last year). The book investigates the transformation of
cinema as it mingles with television and computers, as it moves from
theatres to museums and galleries, and as it undergoes ‘an unprecedented
expansion of intermediate operations’. Bellour is fascinated by the
‘confusion’ and ‘impurity’ of these in-between images at the crossroads
of cinema, video, language and painting, and so am I.
Peter Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw’s terrific book Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film
(2003) unites an interest in pre-cinematic forms with what might be
called post-cinematic forms, with attention to immersive, interactive
and net-based projects. Lev’s book, The Language of New Media
(also more than a decade old) explores the database impulse of Dziga
Vertov in the 1920s to better understand the database as a contemporary
cultural form, while Andrea Zapp and Martin Rieser’s anthology The New
Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative (2002), looks at cross-media
narrative structures. And there are many other books, older and newer,
in an ever-growing bibliography dedicated to describing and imagining
cinema’s futures.
But why the emphasis on ‘the future of cinema’? Paul Dourish and
Genevieve Bell instructively took up a similar question in the context
of ubiquitous computing in a 2007 essay titled ‘Yesterday’s Tomorrows:
Notes on Ubiquitous Computing’s Dominant Vision’, in which they explore a
‘proximate future’, or a future that’s just around the corner, a future
‘infinitely postponed’. But the construction of this near-future
negates that the future imagined in the past is already here; it’s just
not as dazzling as we imagined.
But our ‘future’ cinema, present now, is dazzling. Bruce Isaacs in
The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle
(2012) points to just one example: ‘When Nolan’s Parisian streetscape in
Inception transforms before our eyes, we contemplate the image not of
the city, not of a Paris we may have visited, but of cinema and its
capacity to astonish the senses.’ This, says Isaacs, is what
contemporary cinema can and should do.
But that’s just one way to go. For me, David Gatten’s monumental
three-hour digital video The Extravagant Shadows (2012), in its layering
of off-screen space, onscreen space, painting, music, text and digital
manipulation, captures the concatenation of spaces, times and layers of
reality that embody what it means to be alive today in a digital
culture. Leos Carax’s 2012 film Holy Motors, in a very different manner, represents a similar experience.
Generally, I’m intrigued by the array of projects that experiment with
time and space, that rupture the temporal and spatial codes of classical
cinema and the illusion of coherence they engender. There’s a dispersal
of screens, stories, performers and viewers, all of which are
reconsidered and re-mobilized toward new ends – some good, some bad and
some wonderfully illustrative of our current state of being in the
world.Holly Willis is a faculty member in the School of Cinematic Arts
at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, and author
of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image (2005).
–LEV MANOVICH
Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Listening Post, 2001–2, installation view at Science Museum, London, 2003. Photograph: Graham Peet
The design of the 1990s World Wide Web and graphical web browsers
emphasized a particular information form: hyperlinks between separate
pages, meaning that the logical model of the web and the interface view
became closely aligned. Indeed, in many popular illustrations of the web
at that time, it was shown as a network of single linked documents.
Users were free to link documents in whatever way they preferred.
This led to the emergence of certain common patterns for organizing the
data that were not originally planned by computer scientists. Rather
than a set of pages all linking between themselves, the actual websites
created by users and companies often followed a different organization: a
single page presenting a large collection of linked documents, i.e. a
curated catalogue of data objects. Examples include the list of
‘favourites’, a collection of personal photographs or separate radio
shows archived on the site of a radio station. In my 1998 essay
‘Database as a Symbolic Form’, I called this information form a
‘database’ and opposed it to the historically dominant way of
organization information – the narrative. I used ‘database’ to describe a
catalogue of objects that does not have a single default sort order,
calling it the symbolic form of our time.
In the 2000s, the web was reshaped by new economic, social and
technological forces: web commerce (e.g. Amazon, iTunes), blogs, social
networks (e.g. Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as those
in other languages), and mobile computing (smart phones, tablets,
ultra-portables). So what happens to the database form in this decade?
Does the opposition between narrative and database still define digital
culture? Does it, for example, describe our experience with social media
or mobile apps?
I want to suggest that in social media, as it developed between 2004
and now, the database no longer rules. A new form has instead been
brought forward: the data stream. The data streams of Facebook
and Twitter are perfect examples of this. In the centre of Facebook is
News Feed, featuring an updated list of user’s friends’ activities:
conversations, status updates, profile changes and other types of
events. Even more immediate is Facebook Ticker, which displays these
updates instantly.
Rather than browsing or searching a collection of objects, a user
experiences the continuous flow of events; new events appearing at the
top push the earlier ones from the immediate view. The most important
event is always the one that is about to appear next because it
heightens the experience of the ‘data present’. All events below
immediately become ‘old news’ – still worth reading, but not in the same
category.
In the Facebook and Twitter interfaces, individual broadcasts from
spatially distributed users are formatted into a constantly growing
montage. We can’t, however, compare this with Surrealist-era
juxtapositions of unrelated objects; if you have many friends with
similar backgrounds and interests, at least parts of your stream are
likely to refer to similar topics and experiences.
The data stream could be a called a quintessential modern experience
(‘Make it new’), only intensified and accelerated. But comparing data
streams simultaneously generated by hundreds of millions of people to,
say, navigating a metropolis in 1913 is as useful as comparing today’s
movies (shot at 4K and put through the software where you can adjust
every pixel) to the first films of Thomas Edison and the Lumière
brothers. What the two types of experiences share pales in comparison to
the differences between them.
In retrospect, the first artistic representation of the collective web data stream was Listening Post
(2002), an amazing installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. In this
work, bits of conversations pulled from multiple Internet chat rooms and
forums were displayed simultaneously across a large wall of more than
300 small screens. Listening Post anticipated the data flow
interfaces of Facebook and Twitter by about five years – and today it
keeps reminding us that these interfaces are not the only possible ways
to format data streams.
Sent from my iPhone.

Dr. Lev Manovich is a professor at The Graduate Center, City
University of New York, USA, and director of the Software Studies
Initiative. His new book, Software Takes Control, is published by Bloomsbury Academic in July.- frieze.com/issue/article/future-fictions/

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